Interview with Radadiya Bhavesh, Templatic.com founder

Posted on 18. Jan, 2010 by Mohale Muzi in The Interview

WordPress (salute Matt Mullenweg) has powered the growth of blogging community into a recognized profession and opened up business opportunities to ordinary people to own a share of the media space. WordPress as an open source content management system has also created a new crop of theme developers who are setting trends on how blogs look and feel. Today I’m chatting with R.Bhavesh about his journey into creating premium themes for a living, enjoy the interview…

Briefly introduce yourself… 

Hello everyone, this is R.Bhavesh a 27 young designer, net entrepreneur from India. I love to help small businesses create their professional online presence easily and affordably.

From PremiumThemes.net to Templatic.com, why the need to rebrand?

While PremiumThemes.net was a good domain, it didn’t give us an identity.
 
Like I said, I love helping people build their online presence easily. Creating WordPress themes/templates is the work I love to do the most and will continue to build better, useful templates for years to come. Overtime we might also release templates/themes for other CMS and at those times, a good branding would help us establish ourselves in market.

What got you to the business of creating WordPress premium themes?  

I used to do freelance design work for other people in the US. Most of the times, projects came to me via other agencies and I did not get credit for my work, which is very essential for freelance business.

I created premix themes with the hope of getting recognition. Selling so many licenses was not a real goal but if it became successful, people would recognize me, ultimately leading to more freelance work for me.

Fortunately, WPRemix was a huge success. I got both money and fame. The success was so good, I started premiumthemes.net (now Templatic.com) and time has come that I am too busy to take custom projects.

You’re a team of 5 (yourself included), is that enough seeing the workload involved?

Not really but we are growing. Plus, we are looking for talented people who fit right into the team and hopefully, we will find more people very soon.I just love your thinking out of the box approach to offering tweaking services to the public, is that your selling point (and do you only work with in-house themes or can I bring an outside theme as well)?

I’d love to bring outside themes in future. However, there are some important issues to deal with such as, what happens when a club membership sale is generated? We’d rather love to buy a good design and publish on our store.
Out of the box is definitely one of our key selling points as we aim to help people establishing their own websites with little hassles.

I notice quite a number of features on Templatic.com are similar to WooThemes.com , have they been an influence in your operations?
 
You can say so. In fact WooThemes’ framework has grown too many more features now.

If you take a look, providing customization to the users for the proposed design, those options are the only way to do it. The maximum one can do is, to change control panel design which we already did. I would definitely admit that WooThemes had impacted our customization options but we have our own way and we try our best to make customizations as easy as possible.

You offer 5 free themes on your portfolio, why when your actual business is premium themes?

In fact we will be releasing more of such themes. At Templatic, we love to give back to the WordPress community. We love to do templates and there are some ideas that are not sellable but they are useful of course. For example our LiveTwit and GTD themes are unique in their own right. Not many people would pay for these templates, but they do want some different kind of themes. Whenever we come across such features, we build a theme around it and release it. Check our recently released Aggregator theme.

Secondly free themes attract users to try one of our premium products. They come for more in future and if satisfied, ultimately become our precious customers.

How often do you blog?  

At my personal portfolio site, I blog rarely. However, I do blog regularly about our products and other updates at Templatic. Guess I need to write more and more

What gets you inspired/motivated each day to want to see Templatic.com grow?

Templatic.com provides me with a platform to build strategic templates that are right as per my experience and knowledge. No client is interfering or messing-up a brilliant design with the changes suggested by board of directors (the people who have no knowledge about web design).

If I am wrong at building some templates, people won’t buy them and that will be the genuine feedback. I try to improve with each template release.

You offer 50% commission to your affiliates, why that huge cut?

Because our affiliates do work hard promoting our products and I think they should be rewarded properly.

Which month in 2009 recorded the highest number of themes sold and how many?

While I wouldn’t be more specific, we started releasing advanced themes in May. Since then, we have recorded highest sale in December and it’s growing each month. Each month has higher sale ratio than the previous month.  

PayPal doesn’t allow African based users like myself to receive money, why only offer PayPal payment option to your affiliates (Google Adsense offers cheque payment option, which enables them to increase their revenue while also reaching new markets) don’t you think it’s too limiting using only PayPal?

We’ll consider that. Haven’t really got requests from any of our affiliates till date about this but we will look into this and we’d love to oblige if the demand is sufficient.

Article By Mohale Muzi
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I’m Muzi Mohale, 35 years old better known as a travel blogger through Travelwires.com and South African based. AlreadyInspired.com has been created to meet my love for reading on blogger profiles. I enjoy reading on how other bloggers got introduced into the blogsphere and their strategies on making money through blogging.